In the past I've worked with a number of people who are solid programmers but do not have a traditional computer science background. With no exposure to data structures and algorithms, sub-optimal decisions can be made.To help with this, I've taken to having 1-on-1 sessions to review the fundamentals…

I go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for one weekend every year. Last year we attended £¥€$ by Ontroerend Goed which I've been meaning to write about as it has some interesting ideas for game design. However, as I just came back from this year's festival - I figured it's not…

The name test is reserved by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in RFC 2606 (June 1999) as a domain name that is not intended to be installed as a top-level domain (TLD) in the global Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet for production use. dotTest is a small…

My wife's phone was stolen last week. Though her data is password (/fingerprint) protected, and all of her passwords are stored in 1Password behind a strong master password, she still felt more comfortable after changing the passwords for things accessible from her phone. Since she was doing it, I decided…

If you have a large number of EC2 instances running in an AWS environment, it can be difficult to really understand what is happening in production. In particular, when you use autoscaling groups, it can be difficult to notice when and why your instances are dying and requiring a restart.…

This book is mostly a restatement of a lot of Robert Glass' previous work. As implied by the title, it covers a collection of facts and fallacies about Software Engineering. For each one it gives justifications for why it is true or not true, including referencing appropriate research. I found…

Last Week, Jason Rohrer released his latest game, and it's full of interesting ideas that are worth having a play with. A couple of years ago, my wife and I created Story of Everyone, which experimented with collaborative content creation and player familial relationships. Given the limitations imposed by the…

I picked this book up on a whim because it was cheap and had been on my "to read" list for a while. It covers a number of Computer Science algorithms by relating them to real life examples where they are useful. For example the book relates the…

I recently completed Advent of Code 2017, and enjoyed it so much I'm going to go back to do the previous years. I ended up doing almost all of this year's in Python as that's my most comfortable language for hacking things out, so I didn't really use this year's…